Sound Synthesis

[Joost Schuttelaar]

On 30-aug-2007, at 0:52, Tony Hardie-Bick wrote:

> FM is by far the easiest. I say this, with my own particular bias
> against the negative aspects of digital synthesis (ie, all the stuff
> that causes people to think digital is inferior to analogue). With FM,
> you have a sine oscillator (use a lookup table of 1024 points with
> linear interpolation, or 65K points without). Equip yourself with
> "Musical Applications of Microprocessors" by Hal Chamberlin, and just
> use the oscilltor output as a phase modulation source to other sine
> oscs, and/or to itself.

Tony pointed me to FM two years ago at SynthDIY in Cambridge. I had  
been experimenting with it, but he explained me how was using FM to  
get a nice and anti-aliased sawtooth or square wave out of it. Super  
straightforward, in hindsight. Sounds good too!

In Faze-1 I used phase distortion algorithms to generate sawtooth and  
square waves. The principle is kinda the same - both techniques  
basically waveshape the phasor. Sound is a bit different. The PD  
sawtooth sounds less like a typical sawtooth at lower phase  
distortion levels, which kinda gives it it's charm. At low pitches PD  
creates sawtooths/squares with more harmonics than FM, but (to combat  
aliasing) at high levels the waveforms are less bright.

For analog emulation I'd pick the FM technique anyday. It sounds more  
like normal oscillators and it's much cheaper on the CPU.

There's so much to be had from pure-digital synthesis actually :) we  
haven't seen the bottom yet... and watch out for the Faze-1 plugin  
coming soon! Sans filter! ;)

-- 

Joost Schuttelaar
The Hague, NL